218 FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
just another showman, or perhaps
even a warm-up performer for the
tightrope-walker.
In opening his book in this
unusual way, Nietzsche seems to
be betraying his own unease with
the reception that his philosophy
will receive, as if he is afraid that he
will be seen as a philosophical
showman without anything real
to say. If we want to avoid making
the same mistake as the crowd
gathered around Zarathustra, and
actually understand what Nietzsche
is saying, it is necessary to explore
some of Nietzsche’s core beliefs.
Overturning old values
Nietzsche believes that certain
concepts have become inextricably
entangled: humankind, morality,
and God. When his character
Zarathustra says that God is dead,
he is not simply launching an
attack upon religion, but doing
something much bolder. “God” here
does not only mean the god that
philosophers talk about or the
religious pray to; it means the sum
total of the higher values that we
might hold. The death of God is not
just the death of a deity; it is also
the death of all the so-called higher
values that we have inherited.
One of the central purposes of
Nietzsche’s philosophy is what he
calls the “revaluation of all values”,
an attempt to call into question all
of the ways that we are accustomed
to thinking about ethics and the
meanings and purposes of life.
Nietzsche repeatedly maintains
that in doing so he is setting out a
philosophy of cheerfulness, which,
although it overturns everything we
have thought up until now about
good and evil, nevertheless seeks to
affirm life. He claims that many of
the things that we think are “good”
are, in fact, ways of limiting, or of
turning away from, life.
We may think it is not “good” to
make a fool of ourselves in public,
and so resist the urge to dance
joyfully in the street. We may
believe that the desires of the flesh
are sinful, and so punish ourselves
when they arise. We may stay inmind-numbing jobs, not because
we need to, but because we feel it is
our duty to do so. Nietzsche wants
to put an end to such life-denying
philosophies, so that humankind
can see itself in a different way.Blaspheming against life
After Zarathustra proclaims the
coming of the Superman, he swiftly
moves to condemn religion. In the
past, he says, the greatest blasphemy
was to blaspheme against God; but
now the greatest blasphemy is to
blaspheme against life itself. This is
the error that Zarathustra believes
he made upon the hillside: in turning
away from the world, and in offering
up prayers to a God who is not
there, he was sinning against life.
The history behind this death
of God, or loss of faith in our higher
values, is told in Nietzsche’s essay,
How the “Real World” at last Became
a Myth, which was published in
Twilight of the Idols. The essay
carries the subtitle “History of an
Error”, and it is an extraordinarily
condensed one-page history ofMan is a rope tied
between the animal
and the Superman—
a rope over an abyss.
Friedrich NietzscheExisting between the levels of
animal and Superman, human life,
Nietzsche says, is “a dangerous
wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back,
a dangerous trembling and halting.”